Joaquin Romero
Haskins Labs., 270 Crown St., New Haven, CT 06511
Differences in manner of articulation---between stops, fricatives, and
approximants---have been described articulatorily in terms of degree and area
of the constriction. It is suggested here that such differences are generally
accompanied by a distinction in the duration of the constriction gestures. An
experiment was carried out in which an optical tracking device was used to
record the movement of the lips of a speaker of Andalusian Spanish, a dialect
spoken in Southern Spain that has a complete series of homorganic stops,
fricatives, and approximants. Results of both acoustic and kinematic analyses
indicated that, while certain variation in constriction degree was indeed
observed, the durational differences appeared to be much more stable and
robust. A bilabial fricative [(beta)] not only has a narrower constriction than
an approximant (beta)